Neanderthals have been depicted in popular culture since the early 20th century. Early depictions conveyed and perpetuated notions of proverbially crude, low-browed cavemen; since the latter part of the 20th century, some depictions have modeled more sympathetic reconstructions of the genus Homo in the Middle Paleolithic era. In popular idiom, people sometimes use the word "Neanderthal" as an insult - to suggest that a person so designated combines a deficiency in intelligence and a tendency to use brute force. The term may also imply that a person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as the terms "dinosaur" or "Yahoo". A number of sympathetic literary portrayals of Neanderthals exist, as in the 1955 novel The Inheritors by William Golding, Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story "The Ugly Little Boy", or the more serious treatment by Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén (in several works including Dance of the Tiger (1978)) - compare British psychologist Stan Gooch's non-fiction works on the hybrid-origin theory of humans.

Origins

The contemporary perception of Neanderthals and their stereotypical portrayal has its origins in 19th century Europe. Naturalists and anthropologists were confronted with an increasing number of fossilized bones that did not match any known taxon. Carl Linnaeus' Systema Naturae of 1758, in which introduced Homo sapiens as a species without diagnosis and description, was the authoritative encyclopedia of the time. The notion of species extinction, which would have contradicted the paradigm of an immutable world and its unchangeable species, all the infallible products of a single and deliberate creator god, was unheard of at that time. Most scholars simply declared the early Neanderthal fossils to be representatives of early "races" of modern man. Thomas Henry Huxley, a future supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, saw in the Engis 2 fossil a "man of low degree of civilization". He interpreted the discoveries in the Neanderthal Valley as within the range of variation of modern humans. Rudolf Virchow, who dominated mid-19th century Germany biological sciences, described the bones as a "remarkable individual phenomenon" and as "plausible individual deformation". This statement led to the perception for many years in German-speaking countries that Neanderthal characteristics were merely a form of pathological skeleton change of modern humans to come. August Franz Josef Karl Mayer, an associate of Virchow, emphasized disease, prolonged pain and struggle on comparison with modern human features. "He confirmed the Neanderthal's rachitic changes in bone development[...]. Mayer argued among other things, that the thigh - and pelvic bones of Neanderthal man were shaped like those of someone who had spent all his life on horseback. The broken right arm of the individual had only healed very badly and the resulting permanent worry lines about the pain were the reason for the distinguished brow ridges. The skeleton was, he speculated, that of a mounted Russian Cossack, who had roamed the region in 1813/14 during the turmoils of the wars of liberation from Napoleon." Arthur Keith of Britain and Marcellin Boule of France were both senior members of their respective national paleontological institutes and among the most eminent paleoanthropologists of the early 20th century. Both men argued that this "primitive" Neanderthal could not be a direct ancestor of modern man. As a result, the museum's copy of the almost complete Neanderthal fossil of La Chapelle-aux-Saints was inaccurately mounted in an exaggerated crooked pose with a deformed and heavily curved spine and legs buckled. Boule commissioned the first illustrations of Neanderthal where he was characterized as a hairy gorilla-like figure with opposable toes, based on a skeleton that was already distorted with arthritis.

Portrayals in text

Screenplays and short stories

Novels

Novel series

Comics and manga

Film and television

Video games

Politics

President Joe Biden condemned Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) for ″Neanderthal thinking″ in ignoring health considerations in dropping mask mandates and removing other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in March 2021.